No one in his right mind drives across Siberia in the middle of winter, but Polish journalist Jacek Hugo-Bader is no ordinary traveler. As a 50th birthday present to himself, the former special-needs teacher, loader of trucks, weigher of pigs, and counselor of troubled couples sets out in a modified Russian jeep from Moscow to Vladivostok, a 5,620-mile odyssey across seven time zones on iffy roads awash with bandits and other hazards. The Siberia that Hugo-Bader encounters is slowly dying—alcoholism is endemic in this traumatized post-Communist landscape, as are suicides, murders, and deaths from AIDS. Yet he also finds dark humor amongst the reindeer shepherds, the former hippies, the modern-day rappers, the homeless and the sick, the shamans, and the followers of "one of the six Russian Christs."